IPv4 address transfer markets are forming where we least expected

As IPv4 addresses run out, regions have very different fixes in mind.

The distribution of IP addresses has always occurred in a somewhat socialist manner: "to each according to his needs." But those days are drawing to an end now. So far in 2012 within the North American region, no less than a quarter of all IPv4 address blocks obtained by new owners/users have been traded in some way. This is despite the fact that ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers)—the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) that supplies North America with IP addresses—still has at least 40 million IPv4 addresses available by one count. More than 100 million by another.

Researchers at Syracuse University in New York and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands went over the records of the three RIRs (of five) that allow "transfers" from an organization holding address space to another organization in need of address space. Standard operating procedure is for the former to return addresses to the RIR governing their region, and for the latter to obtain addresses from that RIR. However, in the Asia-Pacific region this is no longer possible: APNIC has less than 17 million IPv4 addresses left, and each organization can now only get one last block of 1,024 addresses. Last week, the RIPE NCC (Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre) in Europe found itself in the same situation—but the study was completed before the RIPE NCC ran out of addresses.

So in Asia, the Pacific, and Australia, the only way to get a significant amount of address space is to find someone with addresses to spare and coax them to transfer some to you. Presumably, this entails some level of monetary compensation. So researchers looked at the period from 2009 until the middle of 2012. In the RIPE and ARIN regions, IPv4 addresses were still available to those who can show they really need them. In light of that, you'd expect to see transfers in the APNIC region, but not in the RIPE and ARIN ones.

And indeed, in the APNIC region, 191,744 addresses were transferred in 2011 with another 713,216 in the first half of 2012. In the RIPE region (Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East), the researchers couldn't find any address transfers. But surprisingly, in the ARIN region (North America)—where there is no immediate shortage—no less than 821,504 addresses were transferred in 2011 with 4.22 million in the first half of 2012.

But in North America, a transfer market did form. In most cases, nothing is known about the prices paid for address blocks. In other instances this information has come out, with the price settling around $10 per address. Why would organizations buy addresses rather than get them for (almost) nothing from ARIN? (I mean, the researchers even note that in one case, the transfer price would pay for the yearly ARIN fees for 86 years.)

One difference between the ARIN region and the rest of the world is that in North America, a large amount of IPv4 address space was given out before the RIR system was created. Many of these "legacy allocations" are from before 1993. Back then, address blocks came in only three sizes: class A (16.8 million), class B (65,536), and class C (256). Many universities got class B blocks. A good number of large businesses and parts of the US and UK governments even received class As—which they've understandably been reluctant to give back.

These days, many systems share an address using Network Address Translation (NAT) and usable blocks can be as small as 8 or 16 addresses (although you need a block of at least 256 addresses if you want to trade). So holders of legacy address space have a lot of material to trade with. The holders of this space also never signed the contract with ARIN that spells out that "address space [is] not to be considered to be property."

So although the RIRs give out addresses to organizations that "need" them, the time horizon for the need justification has become shorter as the depletion of the IPv4 address space drew closer. This means that, for instance, Amazon would be able to get addresses for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service that are going to be deployed within a year. If it then needs more, it has to come back. By buying a large block of addresses, an organization can avoid the need to come back to ARIN for more addresses on a regular basis (and avoid the built-in unhappy ending).

ARIN maintains that transfers can only happen if the recipient can "demonstrate need," and in fact about a third of attempted transfers end up not happening. However, the researchers write that when Microsoft obtained Nortel's IP addresses in bankruptcy proceedings, the transfer policy was "bypassed."

"A last-minute intervention by ARIN, and private appeals to Microsoft, led to a compromise solution. Microsoft agreed to sign a special contract for legacy holders, known as a LRSA, and ARIN agreed that the transaction gave Microsoft the same de facto property rights held by the prior legacy holder, Nortel."

However, ARIN doesn't see it that way: "It is unfortunate that the paper includes conclusory material based on Milton Mueller's misconceptions of the first bankruptcy transfer," John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN, told Ars. Mueller is the lead author of the paper, and the bankruptcy transfer was where Microsoft bought 666 thousand addresses—I swear I'm not making this up—from bankrupt Canadian network equipment maker Nortel. Curran: "as it is clear that the specified transfer market is quite successful under the policies established by the ARIN community and this now includes numerous bankruptcy-related transfers which not only follow ARIN's policies but directly recognize ARIN's role in the transfer process."

When non-markets make sense

Although the IPv4 address market in North America is surprisingly robust since "free" addresses are still available, in the Asia-Pacific region, the numbers of addresses transferred don't amount to much. This holds especially true given the region's voracious appetite for fresh addresses in recent years. After using up more than 100 million addresses in both 2010 and 2011, it's hard to see how 0.7 million addresses transferred in six months can allow for business to continue as usual.

The reason I've always been very skeptical about address trading as a solution to the IPv4 address depletion is that I don't see how the world's largest ISPs, which use millions of addresses per year to connect new customers, are going to pay tens of millions a year to buy new addresses. Especially because it will get harder and harder to find sufficient amounts of tradable address space each year, pushing prices upward. Buying big Network Address Translation boxes and having users share an address is a more attractive proposition. As technology gets cheaper over time and as traffic moves to IPv6, fewer NATs can serve more users.

But we now know there are other players than ISPs looking to secure enough IPv4 addresses for the medium term. There's also the possibility that address trading will take off once trading between regions becomes a possibility, so that address-starved Asians can buy up addresses from North American companies such as HP. That company happens to be sitting on more than 33 million addresses. Or consider the US government, which has more than 168 million. Ultimately, maybe the money is better spent upgrading to IPv6 instead.

Iljitsch van Beijnum
Iljitsch is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, where he contributes articles about network protocols as well as Apple topics. He is currently finishing his Ph.D work at the telematics department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in Spain. Emaililjitsch.vanbeijnum@arstechnica.com//Twitter@iljitsch

Why build into a dead market? IPv4 is only worth less in the long run. Nobody has anything to gain by trading in IPv4 at this point. All the business will need to be in IPv6 from this point. That's where to spend development money.

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can (read: haven't signed a contract) even though they in reality do not ever need that many public IPs?

And the solution for that is that everyone else on the planet spends money and time to upgrade to IPV6?

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can (read: haven't signed a contract) even though they in reality do not ever need that many public IPs?

And the solution for that is that everyone else on the planet spends money and time to upgrade to IPV6?

Hello???

We're running out of IPv4 addresses because the number of devices is nearing the total number of IPv4 addresses possible. We're running out a few years sooner because of the large allocations, but it's overall a minor timeframe change.

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can (read: haven't signed a contract) even though they in reality do not ever need that many public IPs?

And the solution for that is that everyone else on the planet spends money and time to upgrade to IPV6?

Hello???

Yeah that's basically it, and it does suck. But there's not much we can do to make these people give up their (potentially valuable) addresses, and we're going to need to go to IPv6 sooner or later anyway...

(Also, by the sounds of it, various US companies have a lot more addresses than the universities. This is worse because companies are usually more money-driven than universities.)

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can (read: haven't signed a contract) even though they in reality do not ever need that many public IPs?

And the solution for that is that everyone else on the planet spends money and time to upgrade to IPV6?

Hello???

We're running out of IPv4 addresses because the number of devices is nearing the total number of IPv4 addresses possible. We're running out a few years sooner because of the large allocations, but it's overall a minor timeframe change.

The Ars article definitely doesn't give the impression that universities are the problem. Class B blocks are only 65,536 addresses - Class A ones are a power of two larger.

We're running out of IPv4 addresses either way - it's only going to get more expensive to switch if there are more devices to replace. If the problem hadn't surfaced for another 10 years, it would have only made things worse.

My current employer is sitting on a /16 block of IP4 addresses (yes, 65,000+) and we could do fine with a /24. Maybe these things will be worth something one day!

If that same concept applied to all my Topps sports trading cards from when I was a kid like they said, I would be sitting on a gold mine right now. Instead, they'd probably fetch more as recyclable paper to China than they're worth otherwise.

Kidding aside, what you mention of your employer is a pretty big problem. A lot of companies here in the US were given massive Class A and Class B networks early on and they have just kinda sat around on them when they could have easily used a smaller subsection of them, especially once the Internet technologies matured and we became less reliant on all of these public facing IP addresses. Despite this, even if we were to free up all these addresses and put them to use, it would only serve to temporarily mitigate the problem and cause even more procrastination among the powers that be to really deploy IPv6 the way they should already be doing.

Primary difference between IPv4 and v6 is only one of them is guaranteed to work with your existing infrastructure (and staff). Seems worth paying to me.

EDIT: as IPv4 address scarcity increases the price of IPv4 addresses will increase. This will in turn lead organisations to consider selling their class A/B blocks as they realise holding an asset worth a metric boat-load of cash is not very clever.

I know I keep saying the same thing every time an IPv4 doom and gloom article comes up, sorry, but I find the lack of application of basic economics frustrating (and yes IPv6 is way cool and all that, but IPv4 is going to be here for a very long time).

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can (read: haven't signed a contract) even though they in reality do not ever need that many public IPs?

And the solution for that is that everyone else on the planet spends money and time to upgrade to IPV6?

Hello???

It's more than just because they can. They can't just provide a list of address that they are using and give everything else back to be given out to other people. If an agency has a class A (16.8 million) but only needs a class B (65,536) they have to go through their entire network and make sure that everything is setup to be in that single class b's range of addresses. This could entail changing router configurations, static ip addresses assigned to servers and etc. A lot of this stuff can't be done during normal operations and can be potentially problematic. If a server has been assigned a specific ip address you need to be able to identify every spot that ip address is used and update it to the new address when you change it. I deal with a couple dozen servers at work and moving them to new ip address is not something I'd want to have to do ever. Sure, if they had enough foresight they would have planned their usage well so that they weren't spread out across their entire Class A block just because they had it but they did that way back when before anyone even considered running out of addresses.

Beyond that, it ultimately would be pointless as it would only offer a little bit of relief and delaying of the inevitable. We simply are heading for far more devices connected to the internet than could ever be uniquely address with IPv4. Yes, IPv4 will hang around for quite a while but hopefully IPv6 will be viable for the majority of your needs on a modern device soon.

We're running out of IPv4 addresses because the number of devices is nearing the total number of IPv4 addresses possible. We're running out a few years sooner because of the large allocations, but it's overall a minor timeframe change.[/quote]The Ars article definitely doesn't give the impression that universities are the problem. Class B blocks are only 65,536 addresses - Class A ones are a power of two larger.

We're running out of IPv4 addresses either way - it's only going to get more expensive to switch if there are more devices to replace. If the problem hadn't surfaced for another 10 years, it would have only made things worse.[/quote]

This problem was foresaw in the late 90s, when there was not even half as many devices. The spec was published in 1998. I have no pity on any one for this whole IPv4 mess we're in. This is called people making decisions where too stupid to realize what smart people already did, and failed to act then. Now the change is going to be a major pain in the ass and cost 100x as much as it would have to simply adopted the IPv6 standard at the time.

Primary difference between IPv4 and v6 is only one of them is guaranteed to work with your existing infrastructure (and staff). Seems worth paying to me.

Or to rephrase you, "If it is 2012 and you have managed to pay so little attention both in financial terms, and in terms of planning that you suspect a significant component of your existing infrastructure (and staff) may still not be ipv6 capable, then running out of ipv4 addresses is highly likely to be the very least of your problems, you utterly incompetent person."

It's sad to know that I've read on a mag a decade ago on the out-of-IPv4-address issue, and yet not enough was done in the intervening decade to avoid this bad situation that we knew for sure will happen.

Now I hope issues like global warming are indeed "invented" by evil scientists as a scheme for stealing money from hardworking average Joes, because if it wasn't, we are all doomed :-/

This problem was foresaw in the late 90s, when there was not even half as many devices. The spec was published in 1998. I have no pity on any one for this whole IPv4 mess we're in. This is called people making decisions where too stupid to realize what smart people already did, and failed to act then. Now the change is going to be a major pain in the ass and cost 100x as much as it would have to simply adopted the IPv6 standard at the time.

I wonder if our networking knowledge and hardware capability was up to the challenge though? The last decade has seen remarkable progress in silicon and CS advancement.

Primary difference between IPv4 and v6 is only one of them is guaranteed to work with your existing infrastructure (and staff). Seems worth paying to me.

EDIT: as IPv4 address scarcity increases the price of IPv4 addresses will increase. This will in turn lead organisations to consider selling their class A/B blocks as they realise holding an asset worth a metric boat-load of cash is not very clever.

I know I keep saying the same thing every time an IPv4 doom and gloom article comes up, sorry, but I find the lack of application of basic economics frustrating (and yes IPv6 is way cool and all that, but IPv4 is going to be here for a very long time).

So much +1...

Free trading of IPv4 addresses is the only natural thing to resolve that issue. IPv4 will be with us for at least 10-15 more years (In addition to IPv6) and even after that some people might want to use it for legacy stuff.

This might be unpopular here but I think they should be treated and regulated like other commodities like natural resources and everybody that wants IP addresses should be able to buy them, regardless of need etc. Sure at the beginning they were unfairly distributed, but so was Oil and Silver. As the price rises more and more companies with a large surplus will sell their addresses and there will be a true monetary incentive to switch to IPv6.I don't think ISP will have that big of a problem. I already have to pay a "connection fee" when I first join them. They can buy an IP address from that and keep that IP address over the course of my contract. When prices go higher they can even offer me two possible plans: an (upfront) more expensive IPv4+IPv6 connection and a cheaper IPv6 only connection. If your home network/10 year old PC cannot manage IPv6, even the average Joe would have an incentive to upgrade.

Edit: Alternatively we can also negate the uneven distribution by estimating how many addresses every region should have and relocate them through the RIR - though that would be difficult and could have unforeseen consequences...

The Ars article definitely doesn't give the impression that universities are the problem. Class B blocks are only 65,536 addresses - Class A ones are a power of two larger.

Actually eight powers of two, but who's counting.

MIT has a class A block. Stanford had one, but returned it.

But do you really want to hear something sad? There's 268 million pristine, never used IPv4 addresses "reserved for future use" that are never going to be deployed: the class E block (240.0.0.0 - 255.255.255.255). Why? Because programmers everywhere inserted a line of code that checks for these addresses, and doesn't allow them to be used, because they're "reserved for future use". Like the one taxi that's at the train station in the middle of the night that refuses to take you anywhere because the city requires that there is one taxi present at the train station throughout the night.

What people seem to forget when they argue that companies who own a Class A should just return it, is that renumbering an entire network may not be a tivial and cheap task, especially in organisations that have been using the addresses since the 1980's. There may be many devices in different nooks and crannies that have hard coded addresses on them and the network design will most likely not be set up with address conservation in mind.

To date, Stanford University are the only ones who have ever returned an IPv4 block for the greater good.

In April, Stanford will complete a labor-intensive two-year effort that involves reconfiguring all 56,000 computers and devices on its network to more efficiently use Internet address space. Afterward, Stanford will return an enormous block of unused Internet addresses - more than 16 million - to the organization that oversees 'Net address allocation in North America.

This problem was foresaw in the late 90s, when there was not even half as many devices. The spec was published in 1998. I have no pity on any one for this whole IPv4 mess we're in. This is called people making decisions where too stupid to realize what smart people already did, and failed to act then. Now the change is going to be a major pain in the ass and cost 100x as much as it would have to simply adopted the IPv6 standard at the time.

I wonder if our networking knowledge and hardware capability was up to the challenge though? The last decade has seen remarkable progress in silicon and CS advancement.

Definitely.

Basic networking knowledge hasn't changed too greatly since the internet was introduced (or really since the 70s), and hardware capability/silicon standards have very little to do with the introduction of ipv6.

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can (read: haven't signed a contract) even though they in reality do not ever need that many public IPs?

And the solution for that is that everyone else on the planet spends money and time to upgrade to IPV6?

Hello???

The only university that still has a class A is MIT. As for GE, L3, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, HP, DEC, Apple, Ford, CSC, Halliburton, Cogent, Eli Lilly, Nortel, Prudential, DuPont, Daimler, Merck, and SITA (in numerical order by leading octet), it's not a matter of "public" IPs, it's a matter of risk aversion. $10 * 2^24 is pocket change to many of these companies in comparison to the risk of internal network outages. If you were the CEO of Daimler, say, would you honestly approve massive network reconfiguration and the consequent risk to your supply chain, when the opportunity cost of "doing nothing" amounts to less than half a day's revenue?

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can (read: haven't signed a contract) even though they in reality do not ever need that many public IPs?

And the solution for that is that everyone else on the planet spends money and time to upgrade to IPV6?

Hello???

The only university that still has a class A is MIT. As for GE, L3, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, HP, DEC, Apple, Ford, CSC, Halliburton, Cogent, Eli Lilly, Nortel, Prudential, DuPont, Daimler, Merck, and SITA (in numerical order by leading octet), it's not a matter of "public" IPs, it's a matter of risk aversion. $10 * 2^24 is pocket change to many of these companies in comparison to the risk of internal network outages. If you were the CEO of Daimler, say, would you honestly approve massive network reconfiguration and the consequent risk to your supply chain, when the opportunity cost of "doing nothing" amounts to less than half a day's revenue?

Sometimes, you're forced into the change. I see this as one of those times. Lazy ISPs aren't helping this situation at all. We don't even need IPv4 anymore so why does every go on and act like it's the end of the world?

Sometimes, you're forced into the change. I see this as one of those times. Lazy ISPs aren't helping this situation at all. We don't even need IPv4 anymore so why does every go on and act like it's the end of the world?

Primary difference between IPv4 and v6 is only one of them is guaranteed to work with your existing infrastructure (and staff). Seems worth paying to me.

EDIT: as IPv4 address scarcity increases the price of IPv4 addresses will increase. This will in turn lead organisations to consider selling their class A/B blocks as they realise holding an asset worth a metric boat-load of cash is not very clever.

I know I keep saying the same thing every time an IPv4 doom and gloom article comes up, sorry, but I find the lack of application of basic economics frustrating (and yes IPv6 is way cool and all that, but IPv4 is going to be here for a very long time).

IPv4 is guaranteed to stop working in the future. Even if we're able to somehow use every single address from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, it's not enough in the long term. There's a lot we can do to buy us more time, but it's still a sinking ship.

If you thought the real estate bubble was bad, just imagine what would happen if/when an artificially inflated IPv4 market implodes. Also, any region that does commit to moving over to IPv6 (most likely Asia since that's where the situation is the worst) will get a *huge* advantage over areas with expensive IPv4 trading schemes. Would you establish your company in a country where each IP address cost $100,000, or some place where you can get thousands of addresses virtually for free?

This problem was foresaw in the late 90s, when there was not even half as many devices. The spec was published in 1998. I have no pity on any one for this whole IPv4 mess we're in. This is called people making decisions where too stupid to realize what smart people already did, and failed to act then. Now the change is going to be a major pain in the ass and cost 100x as much as it would have to simply adopted the IPv6 standard at the time.

I wonder if our networking knowledge and hardware capability was up to the challenge though? The last decade has seen remarkable progress in silicon and CS advancement.

Definitely.

Basic networking knowledge hasn't changed too greatly since the internet was introduced (or really since the 70s), and hardware capability/silicon standards have very little to do with the introduction of ipv6.

I don't think you understand how a true hardware router works, because they use ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to forward the number of packets they do and that means hardware capability DOES MATTER.

When you're an ISP like Level 3, and you have routers that can forward over 1 billion packets per second (for example Juniper T1600 can do upwards of 1.92 billion packets per second), that's not something forwarded via software.

This problem was foresaw in the late 90s, when there was not even half as many devices. The spec was published in 1998. I have no pity on any one for this whole IPv4 mess we're in. This is called people making decisions where too stupid to realize what smart people already did, and failed to act then. Now the change is going to be a major pain in the ass and cost 100x as much as it would have to simply adopted the IPv6 standard at the time.

I wonder if our networking knowledge and hardware capability was up to the challenge though? The last decade has seen remarkable progress in silicon and CS advancement.

Definitely.

Basic networking knowledge hasn't changed too greatly since the internet was introduced (or really since the 70s), and hardware capability/silicon standards have very little to do with the introduction of ipv6.

I don't think you understand how a true hardware router works, because they use ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to forward the number of packets they do and that means hardware capability DOES MATTER.

When you're an ISP like Level 3, and you have routers that can forward over 1 billion packets per second (for example Juniper T1600 can do upwards of 1.92 billion packets per second), that's not something forwarded via software.

L3 has been fully IPv6 Since around 2006. Hurricane Electric is the same, but since 2001.

This problem was foresaw in the late 90s, when there was not even half as many devices. The spec was published in 1998. I have no pity on any one for this whole IPv4 mess we're in. This is called people making decisions where too stupid to realize what smart people already did, and failed to act then. Now the change is going to be a major pain in the ass and cost 100x as much as it would have to simply adopted the IPv6 standard at the time.

IPv4 mess who is in? "we"?

That "we" certainly doesn't include the vast majority of United States. We've got our addresses so there really isn't a problem for us. Most companies are sitting on way more static public address than they actually need.

And that "cost 100x as much" to adopt IPv6 because we waited, that's complete nonsense. I've saved my company tons of money by NOT switching to IPv6 yet. The standard just isn't that well supported yet and the transition will go smoother the later we wait. We have a ton of networked legacy hardware and replacing it all is out of the question. We can go at least another 10 years with an IPv4 LAN, and probably longer than that. There is absolutely zero benefit to us in switching to IPv6.

This is precisely why the majority of US companies haven't switched. When critically analyzed, it doesn't make sense to do anything yet. When it finally does make sense to transition, they will start with just a few WAN accessible servers, routers, and switches on the edge of the LAN. It won't cause a clusterfuck because they waited.

This conclusion is infuriating to some geeks and people from regions with shortages, but it is reality. It may not be moral or fair, but it is logical for most companies that already have sufficient IPv4 address, to put off the transition as long as possible.

Primary difference between IPv4 and v6 is only one of them is guaranteed to work with your existing infrastructure (and staff). Seems worth paying to me.

EDIT: as IPv4 address scarcity increases the price of IPv4 addresses will increase. This will in turn lead organisations to consider selling their class A/B blocks as they realise holding an asset worth a metric boat-load of cash is not very clever.

I know I keep saying the same thing every time an IPv4 doom and gloom article comes up, sorry, but I find the lack of application of basic economics frustrating (and yes IPv6 is way cool and all that, but IPv4 is going to be here for a very long time).

Precisely, the crisis has always been farther off than the doomsday predicted by IPv6 advocates. As the shortage increases the value of address blocks, more and more will suddenly come up for sale. For around a decade i've been reading that a crisis is just around the corner. It wasn't true ten years ago and it isn't true now.

This isn't suggesting that we stick our heads in the sand. Rather it is simply acknowledging that the sky isn't falling and that companies are indeed behaving logically.

So if I understand this article correctly, we are running ouf ot IPV4 addresses because government agencies and universities in the USA are cybersquatting on them just because they can

We created NAT and changed the way Web servers and such require IPs to kick the can 10 years further down the road so IPV6 equipment could be deployed through normal replacement policies. That's happened a large portion of existing equipment supports it now. New deployments use it now.

For existing deployments, organizations will wait until there is something to gain by moving. This is a network effect; the social kind. Once there is a demand to communicate with someone/something that's only available on IPV6 or everyone else is moving -then- businesses will have a reason to transition perfectly working networks or at least translate to IPV6 at the gateway.

If your ISP has equipment that supports 40Mb or faster, it probably supports IPv6

Comes down to this. If someone has a Win7 machine and can speed test 60Mb/s, their network/ISP more than likely supports IPv6 and is just a matter of the ISP configuring it.

A WRT54G can handle more than 40Mbps, but not IPv6 (with stock firmware). My gigabit ethernet wireless N router doesn't either (no IPv6 and no custom firmware exists). My FIOS connection tests at 58 Mbps and I can order more, but no IPv6 in sight for Verizon.

AFAIK no AAAA records exist for arstechnica.com. Any insight on why Ars hasn't enabled ipv6 yet? It would be interesting to know if there are any kind of technical problems. It's not like switching to https for all navigation wich is an all-or-nothing move.

This problem was foresaw in the late 90s, when there was not even half as many devices. The spec was published in 1998. I have no pity on any one for this whole IPv4 mess we're in. This is called people making decisions where too stupid to realize what smart people already did, and failed to act then. Now the change is going to be a major pain in the ass and cost 100x as much as it would have to simply adopted the IPv6 standard at the time.

IPv4 mess who is in? "we"?

That "we" certainly doesn't include the vast majority of United States. We've got our addresses so there really isn't a problem for us. Most companies are sitting on way more static public address than they actually need.

And that "cost 100x as much" to adopt IPv6 because we waited, that's complete nonsense. I've saved my company tons of money by NOT switching to IPv6 yet. The standard just isn't that well supported yet and the transition will go smoother the later we wait. We have a ton of networked legacy hardware and replacing it all is out of the question. We can go at least another 10 years with an IPv4 LAN, and probably longer than that. There is absolutely zero benefit to us in switching to IPv6.

This is precisely why the majority of US companies haven't switched. When critically analyzed, it doesn't make sense to do anything yet. When it finally does make sense to transition, they will start with just a few WAN accessible servers, routers, and switches on the edge of the LAN. It won't cause a clusterfuck because they waited.

This conclusion is infuriating to some geeks and people from regions with shortages, but it is reality. It may not be moral or fair, but it is logical for most companies that already have sufficient IPv4 address, to put off the transition as long as possible.

You forgot the Asia factor.

As trade around the Pacific Rim starts to gravitate more to Asia than to the USA, people in the region will want compatibility with the standard used by China and Korea.

And with billions of citizens, I bet China prefer IPv6 to IPv4... after all, with IPv6 they can track their citizens better; no need to pore over NAT logs just to find out who posted something against the government...

I don't see how the holders of IP addresses can claim "ownership" for something they haven't paid for. I seriously doubt they can produce a bill-of-sale for the IP addresses.

I think the fix would be to start charging a yearly fee for every IP address that an organization has, like $1 per IP per year. When /8 holders have to pay $16,777,216 per year, they'll start thinking about giving back unused addresses. That money could be used for infrastructure improvements, like IPv6 upgrades.

One IPv6 capable modem, and router didn't cost that much especially looking long term. The hold-up as usual is my ISP.

I got an IPv6 tunnel from Hurricane Electric. It's not as good as native but pretty hassle-free for browsing etc. http://tunnelbroker.net/ Also there are some browser plugins that show if you're browsing over IPv6, like SixOrNot.